“Is he ready?” Craig asked.
“Yes.”
“Jillian’s coming forward to help guard the curtain and the galley.”
“Good,” Ward replied. “I’ll be just inside.”
Craig stepped into the cockpit and slid into his seat to brief Alastair before pulling the PA microphone out of its cradle.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is the captain. I promised that as soon as that C-17 left and we had this problem resolved, we would let you get off the airplane. We’re ready now. Please bring all your personal belongings and deplane through the forward left door, the same one you came in. I will be in the passenger lounge in a few minutes to answer questions and tell you how we’re going to get you to your destinations.
Craig did the same announcement in French and German before turning around to lock the cockpit door.
“Get the company back on the line, Alastair, if you would please. We’re going back to the let’s-charter-ourselves chapter.”
NINETEEN
For a man with a six-foot-four-inch frame, climbing into the compact cabin of a Learjet Model 35 was always a minor challenge. But Stuart Campbell eased himself into one of the leather seats of his Lear with practiced ease and unfolded a wall-mounted table. In his peripheral vision he saw the Navy car that had brought him from the NAS-One part of the base to his aircraft pull away to a respectable distance and park.
He reached for the onboard satellite phone and stopped, his hand hovering just short of picking it up.
You’re moving too fast, your tubship! he thought to himself, specifically using the derogatory pet name a former lover had given him when he purchased an estate in Northumberland, which came with the amusing title, “lordship of the manor.”
“Tubship, I should think,” his lady decided.
He’d been a few pounds heavier then, as well as thoroughly unfamiliar with the institution of regular exercise, but the intervening years of workouts had shed the once-developing pot belly, along with the young woman who’d declared it unlovable. Only the epithet remained, and for some reason it still amused him.
Campbell leaned forward, intertwining his fingers on the small desk as he concentrated on the flaw in his thinking. The shock of apparently losing Harris to an American rescue had obscured the fact that he had no real confirmation yet that the rescue had actually occurred.
Could that sly old bastard still be on that 737? he wondered. Probably not, but he should put off the call to Lima until he was certain.
The captain of the Learjet came in the door as his employer hauled himself out of the seat and back onto the ramp.
“You and Gina stay here, Jean-Paul,” he said, smiling at the female copilot, who was also Jean-Paul’s wife. “I’ll be back.”
As his feet touched the concrete, the Navy staff car lurched into gear and headed back toward the Lear. The driver’s mission, Campbell was sure, being to keep him under tight control.
One hundred eighteen passengers trundled down the airstairs and across the leased Sicilian ramp as the last vestiges of twilight faded around Sigonella, casting an unearthly glow about the summit of Mt. Etna to the northeast. All the helicopters had departed, the two from competing Italian television outlets leaving the moment their assignment editors had learned that the American mission was complete and the former American President was on his way back to the United States – a myth propelled and perpetuated by several key interviews given by an unnamed source at the White House. John Harris’s presence on the Air Force jet had not been confirmed by the source, but the fact that an official reception was being planned for the C-17’s arrival in D.C. had been happily relayed and was entirely true. There was, of course, the small, unmentioned detail that the assigned reception committee consisted of a low-ranking White House aide and a steward, both of whom were expecting to “receive” only a tired aircrew on arrival at Andrews AFB. The resulting misunderstanding by the media had flashed around the globe: “Arrest of American Ex-President Foiled by Air Force Rescue!” The headlines instantly lowered the news value of Flight 42’s displaced passengers.
In the cockpit of EuroAir Flight 42, Captain Craig Dayton watched the exodus of his passengers as he waited for EuroAir’s director of operations to answer the satellite line. It was not a call he’d been looking forward to.
“They want to do what?” the director of operations, Helmut Walters, asked from Frankfurt.
“Two things, sir. First, charter this aircraft for at least two days. Second, pay for whatever charter you can get together to take the passengers out of here and bring them back to Rome. They also want to pay for any additional expenses this diversion has cost.”
“Captain Dayton, you call that a diversion? None of us yet knows what you were doing! Were you hijacked?”
“No,” Craig sighed as he rubbed his forehead and tried to choose the right words.
“At one time Rome Control thought you’d crashed. We thought you’d crashed! Wait… I’m putting you on speakerphone. The chief pilot is here, too. We all want to know what you were doing.”
“All right, here’s the deal,” Craig began. “I had a situation in Athens where I thought we were about to be either hijacked or attacked. I wasn’t sure whether we were facing the outfall from a Greek coup d’état or a direct assault because of the presence of the former U.S. President.”
He could hear consternation on the other end.
“Captain, operations said they told you to hold at the gate, and yet you started and blew over all sorts of things backing out,” the operations director said.
“And you may have hurt the engines with foreign object damage, Dayton,” the chief pilot added, “not to mention the fact that backing out violated all our procedures.”
“Gentlemen,” Craig countered, “if I’d stayed there and been the victim of some bloodbath and lost our passengers and the airplane, would you feel the same? Keep in mind that I had no way of knowing whether someone was holding a gun to the head of the operations agent or not.”
“But that was not the situation, eh, Captain Dayton?” the director of operations said.
“No, but it’s all too easy for you to declare that now, in hindsight, Herr Walters, and to thump me on the head with the news that there was no real threat. But I perceived a threat! I perceived a major, immediate threat. And I was the one in command, right there, right then, who had to make a decision, and I’m always going to err on the side of safety. Would you want me to act otherwise? Certainly our passengers wouldn’t.”
There was sudden silence from the other end, and Craig could tell they’d been momentarily halted by the logic of his argument.
“Very well, Captain, but why did you then fail to land in Rome, fly to Sicily, keep your passengers cooped up, and make Rome Control think you were crashing?”
“Same reason, sir. Whatever or whoever was after us at Athens appeared to be lying in wait in Rome for reasons I absolutely cannot discuss on a nonsecure telephone connection.”
Craig could see Alastair stifling a laugh in the right seat as he continued.
“I was completely convinced that everyone aboard was at risk, and I chose Sigonella because it was an American base, I had an American ex-President aboard being chased by God knows who, and I felt my passengers – who included an American tour group of forty-four, by the way – would be far safer here than anywhere else. I don’t know the Italian military bases. I do know this one. And, okay, why the sudden descent without the transponder into here? Because, if you didn’t know it, we were being literally followed by another aircraft and several fighters, and I wanted to lose them. I wasn’t interested in being shot down on final approach when I’m most vulnerable and have no countermeasures or missiles on board.”